Language comprehension requires the listener or reader to rapidly integrate different types of linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge in order to develop a representation of the input. The question of how and when different sources of information are coordinated is central to understanding both normal language comprehension and comprehension difficulties in impaired populations. The proposed research investigates how syntactic processing is influenced by specific lexical knowledge associated with verbs and how syntactic processing is influenced by syntactically relevant information in the discourse. Research on the lexical-syntactic interface will examine how information about verb structure is used in parsing and interpretation. Research on the discourse-syntactic interface will focus on how discourse-based information is used in syntactic ambiguity resolution. In both domains it remains unclear whether the information is used to guide or to filter, and, if necessary, revise initial syntactic analysis. These questions will be addressed in experiments with both spoken and written language utilizing experimental procedures designed to investigate real-time language processing, including monitoring eye-movements in reading and speeded reaction time tasks with both auditory and visual materials. The results will enable us to test and refine current models of language comprehension as well as to identify significant modality differences between spoken and written language comprehension.